for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities detailed the utopian schemes and sometimes actual homes and communities designed by early materialist feminists who argued that housework and childcare must be socialized and incorporated into new spatial arrangements to facilitate women’s entry into the workforce, equality with men, and intellectual development.69 Visions of the “non-sexist city” often centre housing issues, noting that the nuclear family home is a really inefficient way to utilize labour, one that keeps women tied to the home with little time or energy for other pursuits.70 Housing developments that allow households to share the work of cooking, cleaning, and caring for children are common features of feminist designs. Wekerle notes that in the 1970s and 1980s, before federal funding for subsidized housing was scaled back in the first wave of neoliberalism, a variety of cooperative housing developments that focused on lower-income groups with specific needs—single mothers, older women, disabled women—were built in cities across Canada.71 These examples can remind of us that there are already existing alternatives. Some of the work of imagining the non-sexist city has already been done.
When I started my master’s degree with a child under one year of age and no way to afford day care (wait lists for subsidized spots were outrageous), I scrambled to find time to complete my work. Luckily, I met Anneke. We had classes together and discovered that we were both the primary caregivers for very young kids. I started bringing Maddy to Anneke’s house two days a week and we took turns watching the kids while one of us left for a few hours to study. The little bit of extra time afforded by what I liked to call the “city’s smallest babysitting co-op” made a huge difference. At the time, I thought that we were just lucky. I didn’t realize that we were part of a long tradition of mothers and other caregivers coming up with ingenious arrangements for doing care work in the city. These creative practices of “getting by” have informed feminist urban interventions since the nineteenth century.
Yet, many decades after trenchant critiques of how cities and suburbs fail mothers and other caregivers, the same problems remain. Under neoliberalism, most of the “solutions” generated for those problems have been market-based, meaning they require the ability to pay for extra services, conveniences, and someone else’s underpaid labour. Very few changes, especially in North American cities, have re-imagined and re-worked the built environment and other aspects of urban infrastructure in ways that take care work seriously.72
In Europe, “gender-mainstreaming” approaches to urban planning and budgetary decisions have a longer history. Essentially, these frameworks mean that every planning, policy, and budget decision has to be considered with the goal of gender equality as the departure point. For example, policymakers must ask how a decision will potentially enhance or undermine gender equality. These approaches push cities to consider how decisions support or stymie the care work that literally keeps society functioning.
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